Sony's Vaio P Series gets a colourful upgrade

Sony has revealed a new design update to its Vaio P Series netbook, and has splashed the new range of ultra-portable laptops with both a rainbow of eye-catching colours, and a handful of new features.

The tiny, 8-inch device now features an optical touchpad on the inside of the lid, so you can browse the web while holding the device in both hands, like some kind of giant, deformed Nintendo DS.

It includes a smartphone-esque accelerometer to present documents and websites in both portrait and landscape. You also can jolt the laptop in a direction to move forward and backward while surfing or flick through pictures in an album or pages in a PDF document. Hopefully you can turn that off for reading on the Tube.

The device also comes packed with a bunch of dedicated buttons, allowing for 'Quick Web Access', the hook-up to VAIO Care support and a resolution setting button for larger fonts. And under the hood is a built-in GPS, a digital compass and 3G wireless connectivity.

It runs on Windows 7 Home premium and includes a 64GB solid-state hard drive, an Intel Atom Z540 CPU, 2GB of RAM, 802.11n Wi-Fi, a built-in webcam, stereo Bluetooth, two USB sockets and it weighs a little over 600g.